Bees
by magenta.revival
Summary: There's probably lots of bees in Florida, right?


A/N:instead of studying about anaphylaxis...

Much will be said about Greg and Larry and Figgis and the saga that unfolded. People will talk about the bad haircuts and the Captain's "girlfriend" and Amy's endless struggles with the captain who couldn't care less. It's actually an interesting story, one that even briefly involves the LAPD by way of one Winston Bishop.

Other moments will make less impact.

She is sitting on the couch, crocheting and watching _Lord of the Rings_ , the second one. She never liked this one as much, because it skips so much plot for the sake of drawn out battle scenes. She also has no particular affection for mini basketball or _Hot Rod_ , but she's got Jake's stuff thrown in everywhere and her house is kind of uncharacteristically messy.

For one thing, there are the doilies. When she worries, she crochets. She started when her oldest brother, Erick, joined the Marines. She didn't even like the way they looked, originally, but she remembers when she was little and her grandma used to pray the rosary while she crocheted and waited for Amy's dad to come home in the evenings. It used to make her feel brave, seeing all those prayers laying around the house. Even now, when she doesn't quite believe in prayer, there's something comforting about the twisting of the lace.

The problem being that she's made like…too many. She's out of things to put them under and even more out of people who will accept them as gifts without:

1) Outright protest

2) Snide groaning

3) Sympathetic smiles

It's kind of dumb, really, but compulsions are hard to shake. So the stupid things are in piles everywhere because…well because you can't throw away a prayer rug that may or may not (but definitely is) lucky.

In addition, there was Jake's stuff. Now, he couldn't take it with him, but she also couldn't let it go to Goodwill after his untimely "death". The Captain, who had both more expensive things and more concerned family members, got to fake a dramatic divorce and move to Los Angeles, while Jake was stuck faking his own death in an alley shooting a week later. This all left Amy trying to drum up 'sentimental' reasons to keep the things Jake couldn't see himself replacing (far too much movie memorabilia and things from Toys R Us). Charles had helped a little, but still there was a lot of stuff.

Finally, she was busy. You've heard that story, though. You know about the late nights and the undercover stuff and the dramatic confrontations. You've heard the story about the time the Pontiac Bandit ended up bailing her out of a sticky corner.

But all of that, coupled with what might have been the start of clinical depression (her two favorite people gone with little to no warning on top of the presence of a captain who not only frustrated her but purposefully overlooked her for any interesting police work).

These are the moments you don't see. Not even angsty, really, just tired and burned out, and trying to accept that this might just be the way things are, now. They'd chased the case for months to no avail, and it was looking like this might be a long haul situation. After all, it was too easy to remember the crazed look on Adrian's face his first day back in the precinct. Even if Jake did make it back, how could she know he wouldn't be…

It was just tricky.

It was around then that she scrolled through Facebook and saw the first post about it. She was, by this point, extremely acquainted with frustrating news and asinine political posts, but this was different.

EpiPens were more expensive, now. She told herself not to be dumb, but it kind of got lodged in her brain. She loved Jake, but she'd never been able to convince him to cough up the copay to have one in the precinct, at the very least, until she finally paid for it herself behind his back. Really, it was okay. They lived in Brooklyn. If Jake was allergic to cockroaches or the ink they use in take-out menus, she might have lost a little sleep. But she slept better having it, and he seemed kind of grateful. The problem was that it was still there, in the drawer of her desk at work.

Probably there are bees in Florida. It's almost tropical, right? They have alligators and death snakes and sharks and tarantulas and probably fourteen types of bee. Florida is the kind of state that always seems to be trying to kill you.

And it's just that…fake shootings are one thing. She knows him too well to believe that he would get caught off guard like that. Dying in an alley was a big nothing. That was an old worry, and he worked in some kind of other job now. But…like…they have bees in Florida, probably. He wasn't too used to bees.

She wasn't even supposed to know it was Florida. She'd heard it accidentally, and not reported it. She liked knowing (she liked even better being one of the only ones who knew). Except that…

I mean, what a stupid thing to worry about. A man named "The Butcher" had promised to kill him, and she was worried about a pollinating insect.

And now EpiPens were prohibitively expensive. She didn't know if his alter ego even had a medical history of allergies. Maybe it could even give him away…

There was no way he was going to buy an Epi-pen. Particularly not now.

And she couldn't think of a goddamn way to get him one. Seriously. She knew _nothing_ specific to worry about except for the state of Florida, which was probably absolutely infested with bees.

These are the little worries that should pale in comparison to the big, overarching ones, but they don't. Not once, for four months, did she do anything to compromise the story that the love of her life had died in a tragic shooting except for…

A single automatic epinephrine injector pen, wrapped in a lace doily, and sent to the head of the investigation as secretly as possible with a single note attached.

 _I wasn't sure if there are bees where he is_.

So she sat here, again, sitting on the couch with her needles and, Dios mio, one less worry.

 _Hail Mary, full of grace…_


End file.
